In the 1950s, two Yiddish-language encyclopedias of Jewish artists who died in the Holocaust were published. Remarkably enough, there was also a third and only slightly different work which almost appeared in the same decade but never made it into print. Alyssa Quint tells its story:

Der Jude und die Kunst Probleme der Gegenwart (“The Jew and the Problem of Art in Contemporary Times”) was written in German and prepared for publication in 1938 by the Austrian art historian Otto Schneid. The manuscript of this encyclopedia boasted a preface by the great German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber.

Schneid tried several times to publish his encyclopedia after the war, but he failed. Drafts of it (in German, Hebrew, and partially in English) are held in the University of Toronto’s Fisher Archive, where Schneid’s collection also includes letters that he received from artists throughout the 1930s and letters from surviving artists who wrote to him in the 1950s.

Schneid was a firsthand witness to the École de Paris, or School of Paris, and its robust Jewish component. . . . The art historian Edouard Roditi explains that many of these artists, especially between 1910 and 1940, were of East European Jewish origin, leading some to refer to this scene as the Jewish school of Paris or school of Montparnasse, for the Left Bank neighborhood where these Jewish artists lived and congregated. These were the artists that Schneid sought to document in real time.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.